25 December, 2009, 04:36:29 PM

So I've finally found some passion for seriously listening to music again and iTunes just wasn't cutting it for me. Cog didn't quite have all the features I wanted, and I couldn't get Play to compile or run on Snow Leopard. That only left one option: foobar2000 under Wine.

People have been running foobar2000 under Wine for awhile, mostly successfully. However, it's kind of a hassle to have to download, read about, and configure Wine correctly when you just want to be listening to your music already. To alleviate some of the annoyance, I've created a little app bundle and installer for foobar2000 and Wine. What you get is a foobar2000.app that you can just double click on and it will load more or less like any other app. Of course, the controls look like Windows controls, but hey, we can't have everything, right?

I haven't had a chance to test this bundle extensively, so it would be useful if Mac OS X users could try it and give me some feedback. You can download it here.

Note 1: You will need X11 installed to run this. It may already be installed. If not, find it on the Mac OS X install disc.Note 2: If you have previously one of the beta versions, I recommend deleting your old installation first. Make sure to back up any custom foobar2000 settings.

The download is ~60MB, mostly because it is bundled with Wine. If you already have Wine installed, this should still work perfectly – it should just use the local Wine configuration contained in the app bundle and ignore your previous installation. Nothing is installed to your system directories so your existing version of Wine won't be overwritten or anything like that.

And of course, here are some screenshots of it in action:

Disclaimer: This distribution is experimental and not officially supported. I did speak with Peter about it before I uploaded it and I believe he is having his testers take a look at it, but if you encounter problems, please notify me or post in this thread for the meantime.

Very nice will need to test it as soon as possible.One quesiton, does anyone sees a way to get rid of the X11 terminal window. I know we need X11 but maybe there is a way to completely hide that window...

if you want to hide X11 from the dock you can try Dockless (but since the foobar2000.app has no menubar and instead uses it from X11 which is hidden as well, there will be some flaws... well just try and see for yourself)edit: nice bundle btw

Hi, just to check, I see in the installation screenshots that you have "Audio CD support" there - but I haven't been able to get Wine to have direct access to the optical drives - or USB devices for that matter.

So, does your method actually give foobar2000 the ability to rip Audio CDs? Even better, I don't suppose it has access to USB devices (so I can use foo_dop to sync my iPhone/iPod)?I'm using foobar in VMware Fusion and have it pretty well integrated, but this would be even better integrated in some ways, and wouldn't require running a whole virtual operating system! However, these two limitations of Wine have stopped me being able to do it, so I'm pretty interested in what you've done!

Of course a native OSX foobar2000.app would be awesome, but I totally understand why Peter & co are not interested :/

Hi, just to check, I see in the installation screenshots that you have "Audio CD support" there - but I haven't been able to get Wine to have direct access to the optical drives - or USB devices for that matter.

Sorry, but no. In the updated version I uploaded, I removed the Audio CD support component. I just didn't update the screenshots.

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Of course a native OSX foobar2000.app would be awesome, but I totally understand why Peter & co are not interested :/

I think it would be nice to have a native foobar2000.app for OS X too, but to do it properly would take a fair amount of work. I don't think there are many technical reasons why it couldn't happen, but at least one practical reason is that (to my knowledge) Peter doesn't have access to a Mac for development purposes.

I think it would be nice to have a native foobar2000.app for OS X too, but to do it properly would take a fair amount of work. I don't think there are many technical reasons why it couldn't happen, but at least one practical reason is that (to my knowledge) Peter doesn't have access to a Mac for development purposes.

Yeah, I'd be interested in just how much work it would be. I don't know anything about the components API and where on the grade from totally unfeasible to pretty straightforward the issue of re-compiling components would go, for instance - having a native OS foobar2000.app would be all very well, but most of us rely on a whole bunch of components as well...

Oh well, we can continue to hope. If it were a matter of donating to a "get Peter a Mac" fund, I'm sure we'd find enough in no time

Can you give me more information about your system? What version of Mac OS X are you running?

Thank you for taking the time to reply. I'm running OS X version 10.5.8 on a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Macbook with 2 GB of ram. I recently reinstalled OS X and plan on upgrading to Snow Leopard soon. Let me know if you need to know anything else.

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The components folder is described on the last page of the install. It wont exist until after the install has completed.

Oh ok. Oddly enough, Foobar2000 is installed on my machine even with the error. I can open it and configure it, but as I mentioned I can't find the component folder. Also, just so you're aware, though I've had this machine for about a year now, I'm not really what I would call proficient with OS X though I can work myself through just about anything with a decent set of instructions.

A few questions - if I open up the Foobar2000 package contents and navigate to the Foobar directory, can I just replace the Foobar .exe with the official 1.0 and future updates, or does there need to be a new custom build for each release?

Also, does anyone know a good OSX app for adding universal hotkeys to any program? If I could get universal hotkeys working with this build of Foobar I could pretty much ditch iTunes completely for music.

Thank you for taking the time to reply. I'm running OS X version 10.5.8 on a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Macbook with 2 GB of ram. I recently reinstalled OS X and plan on upgrading to Snow Leopard soon. Let me know if you need to know anything else.

Hmm, well I'm not sure what the problem is. If you were using an earlier version of OS X (10.4 or earlier), that might be problem, but since you aren't, I don't know.

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The components folder is described on the last page of the install. It wont exist until after the install has completed.

Oh ok. Oddly enough, Foobar2000 is installed on my machine even with the error. I can open it and configure it, but as I mentioned I can't find the component folder. Also, just so you're aware, though I've had this machine for about a year now, I'm not really what I would call proficient with OS X though I can work myself through just about anything with a decent set of instructions.

Well you should be able to access the folder by going to ~/Library/Application Support/Wine/prefixes/foobar2000/drive_c/Program Files/foobar2000/components.

My guess is that the error you saw meant that there was some problem writing additional components to that directory. The way the installer works is that only installs core and the standard input components to that directory first, and then installs the rest depending on whether and how you choose to customize the install.

A few questions - if I open up the Foobar2000 package contents and navigate to the Foobar directory, can I just replace the Foobar .exe with the official 1.0 and future updates, or does there need to be a new custom build for each release?

This will work, but you will need to delete your ~/Library/Application Support/Wine/prefixes/foobar2000 directory first. That directory acts sort of like a cache for the contents of the foobar2000.app. Alternatively, you could just copy the updated stuff directly to that location instead.

Sometime in the next few days I plan to update the bundle to 1.0 though.

Well you should be able to access the folder by going to ~/Library/Application Support/Wine/prefixes/foobar2000/drive_c/Program Files/foobar2000/components.

My guess is that the error you saw meant that there was some problem writing additional components to that directory. The way the installer works is that only installs core and the standard input components to that directory first, and then installs the rest depending on whether and how you choose to customize the install.

Hello, first off, thanks for this excellent package. Works well on OS X 10.6.2, no stuttering, but Unicode characters were showing up as boxes. Fixed it by forcing the default font to Osaka.

Anyways, I couldn't find the Wine folder in Application Support either, it only showed up when I ran foobar.app for the first time and wine set itself up. I think that's the problem, you have to run the app atleast once.

A small tip, if you want to use your iTunes music, add "Z:\Users\YOUR_NAME\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music" to the media library. Changing YOUR_NAME to whatever it is for your home folder, of course.

Thank you for taking the time to reply. I'm running OS X version 10.5.8 on a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Macbook with 2 GB of ram. I recently reinstalled OS X and plan on upgrading to Snow Leopard soon. Let me know if you need to know anything else.

Hmm, well I'm not sure what the problem is. If you were using an earlier version of OS X (10.4 or earlier), that might be problem, but since you aren't, I don't know.

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The components folder is described on the last page of the install. It wont exist until after the install has completed.

Oh ok. Oddly enough, Foobar2000 is installed on my machine even with the error. I can open it and configure it, but as I mentioned I can't find the component folder. Also, just so you're aware, though I've had this machine for about a year now, I'm not really what I would call proficient with OS X though I can work myself through just about anything with a decent set of instructions.

Well you should be able to access the folder by going to ~/Library/Application Support/Wine/prefixes/foobar2000/drive_c/Program Files/foobar2000/components.

My guess is that the error you saw meant that there was some problem writing additional components to that directory. The way the installer works is that only installs core and the standard input components to that directory first, and then installs the rest depending on whether and how you choose to customize the install.

Dibrom, I just wanted to thank you again for your help. I think your above advice was probably accurate, but since last I posted I've updated to Snow Leopard and reinstalled Foobar2000 with no issues. Hopefully my previous issues will help out others.

A small tip, if you want to use your iTunes music, add "Z:\Users\YOUR_NAME\Music\iTunes\iTunes Music" to the media library. Changing YOUR_NAME to whatever it is for your home folder, of course.

and it spent a long time indexing my iTunes files. Has this altered - or tagged - my iTunes library? The files did not show up in the foobar window. I'm basically happy with iTunes for my music management, and am just checking out foobar out of curiosity - don't want to mess things up out of ignorance.

The main thing I'm looking for in foobar is the ABX tool which I thought was part of it. Am I mistaken, just not finding it , or is it currently missing?